Midshipman Harry Rosenberg breaks down one of at least a thousand cots he and other volunteers from Washington, D.C., helped clean and put back into storage. / Photos by Dustin Racioppi/Staff Photo

The 38 young midshipmen of George Washington University’s ROTC did not know on Wednesday morning what exactly they were volunteering for, but so goes military life. Aware of the widespread wreckage here brought by superstorm Sandy, they wheeled up Interstate 95 from Washington, D.C., in four passenger-vans to the Red Cross Jersey Coast Chapter headquarters on West Park Avenue in Ocean Township, arriving at dusk on Wednesday.

After a night’s sleep, they had their orders on Thanksgiving morning: To clean more than a thousand cots and fold them for storage.

The cots were used at 16 shelters across Monmouth, Ocean and parts of Burlington counties for residents displaced by the storm, said Ellen Korpar, readiness and response coordinator for the Red Cross. There were about 5,000 of the portable beds at the Red Cross warehouse here that were distributed throughout the state, along with blankets, comfort kits and other necessities, she said. Now the shelters are closed and the cleanup begins.

This is the part of the storm far out of view, the banality bridging recovery and rebuilding.

It made little difference to the cadre of 18- to 22-year-olds studying to become officers in the Navy and the Marine Corps, because, many said, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

“We can’t go to war,” Midshipman Harry Rosenberg, 18, said. “This is what we can do.”

As he deftly broke down a forest-green cot to a slender set of aluminum poles that slips in to a nylon bag, Rosenberg, originally from Pittsburgh, pondered his holiday weekend away from family.

“I had no idea we’d be folding thousands of cots, but whatever I can do to help,” he said.

The midshipmen spent all day Thursday on the rear tarmac of the Red Cross, spraying disinfectant on the wide sea of cots, wiping them down and letting them air-dry “all day, until the sun went down,” said Sgt. Paul Niggl, who is in a program at George Washington to cross over from the enlisted side of the Marines to the commissioned side. “And that’s what we’re doing today.”

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Niggl estimated that the crew had cleaned and folded 600 cots on Thursday, and another 400 or 500 by early Friday afternoon.

“Then we get to go back” home, he said.

The work provided the digital-camouflaged volunteers with an early taste of at least one aspect of military life, for service to country, at any rank, often entails tedium.

“They’re all going to be officers,” said Niggl, 26. “I said, ‘Listen, you’re getting the full military experience here.’ ”

With daylight waning and about 300 cots left to go, they didn’t have to go beyond the borders of the Red Cross property to find traces of the storm — or, for that matter, meaning in their menial work.

Midshipman Julia Stavridis, 21, had found a pair of children’s glasses at the bottom of one of the boxes of cots. As she sprayed disinfectant on a row of cots, she said she imagined how this array of folding beds might have looked just a few days ago.

“We just kind of looked at them and thought, ‘OK, these were really in use,’ ” she said. “Even though we’re just cleaning up, they were somebody’s bed (after they) lost their house.”